TOLEDO, Ohio — Mitt Romney covered a lot of territory Wednesday — rhetorically and geographically — as he crisscrossed Ohio delivering stump speeches that emphasized, alternately, trade, debt, energy, and job creation. But there’s one thing he said at every campaign stop.

“Look, I know the president cares about America and the people of this country,” he told the roughly 3,500 supporters gathered in a convention center here. “He just doesn’t know how to help them. I do. I’ll get this country going again.”

(…)

Many of the partisans who filled the rallies didn’t like hearing their nominee assert that Obama “cares about America.”

“Actually, when he came out and said Obama cared for Americans, I stood back here and said, ‘No he doesn’t!'” said Dan Berger, a welder from Oregon, Ohio. “Obama’s for changing America, he’s bringing America down, he’s not pushing America forward. So I disagree with Mitt on that one.”

“I think Obama cares about certain America, like his constituency in the unions… he cares about his crony capitalist buddies, he cares about Warren Buffett,” she said. “As along as they go along with the line, they’re going to be taken care of. There are certain Americans he does care about. But I don’t think he can look at the average, hard-working struggling American and say Obama cares about them. No.”

As the article goes on to note, there have been times when Romney has taken a more aggressive tone toward the President by saying that he wants to turn America into Europe, that he’s pursuing a “radical” agenda that would “fundamentally transform” America, and by alleging that he has gone around the world apologizing for America even though that’s a patently untrue charge. Even then, though, one got the impression that Romney’s supporters wanted him to get even more aggressive against the President, and perhaps even stroll into the memes that the more radical elements of the right have been pushing about the President for the past four years or more. Ever since the “47 percent” video came out there, it’s been apparent that Romney has gone back to referring to the President as a man who meant well put was “in over his head.” I can only assume that the main reason this has happened is because the campaign has tested this issue in polling and possibly even focus groups and they’ve discovered that, among the independent voters that Romney needs to win over if he’s going to have a chance in a state like Ohio, the aggressive tone doesn’t work at all because that isn’t how most Americans view the President.

This balance between trying to please the base and running a campaign that can speak to independents isn’t new at all. John McCain faced the same problem during his campaign when he was being exhorted by outside groups, and his own running mate, to attack then Senator Obama more aggressively by adopting the memes being pushed by people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. The entire controversy came to a head at a rally in Minnesota in mid-October:

Fearing the raw and at times angry emotions of his supporters may damage his campaign, John McCain on Friday urged them to tone down their increasingly personal denunciations of Barack Obama, including one woman who said she had heard that the Democrat was “an Arab.”

Each time he tried to cool the crowd, he was rewarded with a round of boos.

“I have to tell you. Sen. Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States,” McCain told a supporter at a town hall meeting in Minnesota who said he was “scared” of the prospect of an Obama presidency and of who the Democrat would appoint to the Supreme Court.

“Come on, John!” one audience member yelled out as the Republican crowd expressed dismay at their nominee. Others yelled “liar,” and “terrorist,” referring to Obama.

McCain passed his wireless microphone to one woman who said, “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him and he’s not, he’s not uh — he’s an Arab. He’s not — ” before McCain retook the microphone and replied:

“No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign’s all about. He’s not [an Arab].”

Here’s the video of that exchange, and you can just see the look on McCain’s face when he realizes the monster that has been unleashed:

McCain also reportedly personally squashed efforts by some who wanted to use the Jeremiah Wright issue in the campaign in the closing weeks as some kind of last desperate attempt to take down Obama. The fact that McCain lost, though, was taken as proof in some quarters that this strategy was a failure and that it was a mistake to forgo attacking the President on things like Wright and his alleged ties to people like Bill Ayers. Those people are now an even bigger part of the Republican base than they were in 2008, and that’s probably why we have seen Romney be more aggressive in his attacks on President Obama at times. At the same time, though, there are certain lines that the Romney campaign isn’t crossing in those attacks, and that’s likely frustrating those on the right who think that all Romney needs to do is bring up the issue of the President’s past and the American people will see the light and vote him out of office.

There’s little reason, however, to believe that such a strategy would work, however. As has been noted many times in the past, leaving issues of job approval aside, the President generally benefits from the fact that the American public likes the guy. Demonizing him the way that the hard right wants to do isn’t going to work quite simply because it’s inconsistent with everything that a large segment, indeed a majority I would assert, of the American people believe that they’ve learned by observing this President over the past four years. If anything, taking such a tack is more likely to blow back and hurt Republicans than it is to hurt the President. In fact, we already have evidence that this is exactly what would happen:

As she was campaigning across the country in 2008, much of Sarah Palin’s message involved attacking the President in a manner that clearly resonated very well with those on the right who believed the worst about Obama. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and Obama’s ties to “radicals” in Chicago were mentioned in pretty much every one of her stump speeches. Watching the polls, though, you could see that it was having absolutely no negative impact on the Obama/Biden ticket, while it did seem to have a negative impact most specifically of public perception of Sarah Palin. The attacks also arguably had an influence on independent voters in Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana, states that had been reliably Republican but went Democratic for the first time in decades. If the attacks didn’t work four years ago when the public still knew very little about Barack Obama, why would anyone think that it would work now after the President has been a near daily presence in the news for going on five years?

If he continues slipping in the polls, the calls for Romney to get more aggressive against the President are going to become louder and his insistence that the President is a generally decent man who just got the job wrong are going get booed even more loudly than they were in Ohio this week. If he listens to them, though, he’s likely to do himself more harm then good.

About Doug MataconisDoug holds a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May, 2010 and also writes at Below The Beltway.
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Comments

I think he should just lie. Just make it up as he goes along. The base will love it, and if the lies are outrageous enough there’s no way to fact check them. Remember, that campaign isn’t going to be dictated to by the fact checkers.

In 2008 they forgot to mention that the real influence of Wright and Ayers (and assorted other bogeymen) would not actually be felt until Obama’s second term. Because…..ummm….ACORN Alinksy Black Panthers!

Romney and the Republicans are running on empty. Their best arguments rely on you not asking the next question, not thinking it through. Morning Joe says “Democrats had complete control of the government for 2 years” (not exactly true) “and they couldn’t fix the economy.” That’s his best “political” argument. But it really, really, depends on you not asking “how can you fix the economy in 2 years?” That “Obama will make us Europe” is the same kind of thing. Stop there. Don’t ask “how exactly?” Pfft.

@A: I don’t know if you are kidding or not, but on today’s Politico Playbook, the first story is about Romney’s “attack plan” for the first debate, wherein he will suggest that the President is lying. http://tiny.cc/po1alw

McCain was so tarred by Bush and the GOP brand that he had little chance, but – right up until he picked Palin – I was pretty content with the possibility that he might become POTUS. He might have lost, but kept his soul.

Well, let’s not confuse the sort of people who for obvious reasons get quoted in concerned-trolling articles by the liberal media with the rest of the conservative and Republican body politic.

For every talk radio aficionado out there who’s foaming out the mouth, twitching, baying at the moon, and acting out, wanting from Romney red meat, dammit, there at least are several other people who don’t necessarily think the same way, or at all the same way.

Think about it from this angle. BuzzFeed’s entire audience is, uh, what, exactly? 100,000? 200,000? More? Less? On Nov. 6th over 125 million people are going to cast ballots. Right around half of them give or take are going to vote (gulp) for Romney. That’s a lot of people. And it doesn’t really matter whether Romney keeps doing what he’s been doing or throws a few morsels of red meat.

On a percentage basis very few people on the right side of the spectrum give a rat’s ass what Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin say or think. Even fewer of them ever have heard of Michelle Malkin.

Sometimes we political junkies need to break out of the cocoon in order to see daylight. There’s a whole other world out there.

Obama only “cares about his crony capitalist buddies”? What are those capitalist buddies going to do as Obama is transforming America into something akin to socialist Europe?
Good grief. These people are just spewing out disassociated strings of buzzwords and psycho babble they hear on Fox. All emotion, no logic.

@Gromitt Gunn: The same question could be raised about how the woman doesn’t seem to realize that the defense industry that has bought and paid for Romney’s (and the GOP as a whole’s) campaign is the very definition of crony capitalism.

The Brilliant Minds behind the GOP have spent more than a decade cultivating their base into a hard-core, dedicated group of poorly-educated, highly-religious, deeply scared people who are gullible enough to believe _anything_ the party line tells them, no matter how baldly ridiculous.

– Obama is both a radical Muslim _and_ a puppet of his old Pastor Jeremiah Wright? Sure!
– Communists in the 60s built a planned future for a black Manchurian Candidate to become President of the US by manufacturing a fake Hawaiian birth record? Definitely!
– Cutting taxes on the rich, but pledging to keep government revenue the same, somehow won’t raise taxes on the poor & middle class? Obviously!

Now these red-meat-eaters are the only people who still support them. And as McCain found out, they’re too stupid and bloodthirsty to moderate their views for the general elections. They put themselves on a dead-end path to irrelevancy. My heart bleeds.

God help me, I do love to watch the flailing. I feel almost as if it’s a strain of sadism in me, and it’s probably reprehensible. But it is entertaining, isn’t it?

This is what happens when you see life through the lens of stupid. Through the lens of bigotry. If you cannot understand your enemy you have a harder time defeating him. And from Day #1 the GOP has gotten Mr. Obama wrong. Wildly, absurdly and hysterically wrong. The GOP just needed so desperately for Obama to be a radical “other.” And he was always a moderate “us.”

Well, suck on it, GOP. And I say that in full acknowledgment that schadenfreude is a less than admirable feeling. And yet, suck on it, you stupid, close-minded, bigoted, brainwashed creeps. The beating you’ve got coming is so very richly deserved.

On a percentage basis very few people on the right side of the spectrum give a rat’s ass what Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin say or think. Even fewer of them ever have heard of Michelle Malkin.

What? How thick are you? I’ll grant you Levin and Malkin (outside of the conserva-blog readers), but Rush is estimated to have about 15mil listeners, with Hannity, Savage, and Beck not far behind. Those radio shows, and Fox News, are pretty much the _only_ sources of news for the entire GOP base. Their entire world view comes from those sources. Is it any wonder they’re all pants-pissingly scared all the time?

Romney should go for it. Be the bizarre, freakish, insane radical the base wants him to be.

Not because it will help him win — it won’t, and winning is probably out of reach now anyway — but because it will help the party in the long term. When Romney loses with his current approach, the lesson learned will be that he wasn’t bizarre, freakish or insane enough, and 2016 will be filled with nuts that make Herman Cain look reasonable.

Romney cannot control whether he will win or lose. He will lose. But, if he goes down in a flame of Tea Party fervor, he can control the lessons drawn, and it will begin to set the Republican party on the track of something other than opposing for the purpose of opposing.

Should present trends hold, the President will be re-elected by a comfortable margin.

What the GOP does after this is of paramount importance. Should they go further right, I believe it would result in a further, perhaps greater, defeat in 2016. This would provide the Democratic Party with the ability to establish and implement a great deal of their policy preferences (starting with ACA).

However, should the Republicans moderate – some of their policies, they will actually consolidate a lot of their hard-earned gains since the 1980s.

The great question, then, is whether or not the conservative media structures – which individually profits from not compromising – will accommodate or strangle the needed changes.

The ridiculous thing is that the Obama they want Romney to attack is fictitious. That Obama does not exist. He’s the guy sitting in Clint Eastwoods chair…which is the perfect metaphor of the GOP…and old white guy ranting to an imaginary charachter.

I wouldn’t. It’s only 40 days left and the Democrats have a massive collection of statements by Romney. If he tacked to the center, the Democrats would paint him as a flip-flopper, an etch-a-sketch, and conservatives would argue that he has capitulated.

My profoundest apologies. I meant to quote Doug at the beginning of my comment:

If he continues slipping in the polls, the calls for Romney to get more aggressive against the President are going to become louder and his insistence that the President is a generally decent man who just got the job wrong are going get booed even more loudly than they were in Ohio this week.

That’s what I was responding to. Again, my apologies for not making the connection more clear.

@mantis: So you are insisting that people fact check Mitt Romney when he says that President Obama is a generally decent man?

Insisting? Heaven forfend. Suggesting? Absolutely.

I know you were trying to spin it from “is Obama a decent guy?” to “is Mitt Romney telling the truth,” but the end result is the same — just a couple of stories showing that Obama is a nice, decent guy.

Sorry sweetie, but that evil liberal socialist media cabal has already convinced many people that the President is a nice guy, as evidenced by his personal approval ratings…meanwhile, that supposedly really nice Mr. Romney has proven himself to be an even bigger stiff than John Kerry (now that’s really saying something)…so all the paeans of praise from townhall or whatever other loony right wing site you might want to site won’t help your man…better luck in 2016…

I’m sold. Mitt Romney needs to stop saying Obama’s a decent guy, because it’s just not true, and Romney should stop lying.

I used to say and think the same thing, but it’s time to come clean. Obama’s just not a decent guy who occasionally gets a bit too chummy with bad people. He’s simply a bad person, and we should not say otherwise.

The trouble is, if Romney goes really negative with Obama he is going to get nothing out of it, because Obama is – with the exception of most Republicans and other dyspeptic non-normal voters – generally liked as a person. That was not the case in the GOP primaries, when if Mitt went negative he was doing so with respect to guys like Santorum and Gingrich who are generally not liked by normal voters.

Going negative will remind everyone what an imperious and arrogant corporate manager Romney really is – the kind of guy who would fire his wife or children, or even you, on a whim.

@Just ‘nutha ig’rant cracker: So down thread means the comments that were made prior to later comments. Yet as I view my computer screen down thread is up towards the first comment after the post written by one of OTB’s political sages.
To restate, down thread is up and up thread is down.
Sounds rather Orwellian to me.